The art works, stories, and poetry in this virtual exhibition were created by nine people with experience of the Australian criminal legal system, including incarceration. They gathered on the 26th of September, 2024, in Waterloo, Sydney, to participate in an arts-based research workshop. They spent the day sharing and making art that described their experiences of the criminal legal system. This twelve minute video below was filmed on the day.
Introductions
The workshop began with introductions, where participants were introduced to each other and the workshop’s process art practices. The workshop ran for 6 hours, with breaks for morning and afternoon tea and lunch. All the art materials were provided and participants were taken through scaffolded art practices. That is where they moved through introductory to more complex art practices.
The workshop was part of the research project “Expressions of abuse and agency: Art-making addresses human rights violations in the Australian Criminal Justice System.” As such the exhibition is one of the project’s two data collection sites, with the second being, one-hour, in-depth interviews with participants about their art works. Excerpts of these interviews are interspaced throughout the exhibition
The Art Practices
In the workshop participants were introduced to Process Art, which as it sounds is about the internal ‘process’ of making art rather than the creation of art products. The participants art works should be understood as the symbolisation of their internal experience, rather than compared to art works that can be seen in art galleries.
The process art method supported practitioners to describe and solidify their subjective experience of the criminal legal system. The resulting art works offered material depictions of this internal experience, and were useful in workshop discussions, plus they can be understood as research data.
But most importantly they acted as reference points for participants personal reflections and realisations about themselves and criminal legal system experience.
Scaffolding
After the introductions at the beginning of the workshop, participants were taken through a scaffolded process, where they moved from preliminary to more advanced art practices.
They were also introduced to the art materials and Visual Library, which contained imagery related to each practice.
At the beginning of the workshop participants did four quick warm up practices: Mark Making to Express Thoughts, Colour to Express Emotion, Symbol Making, and Drawing Energy.
Bringing it all together
After lunch the participants created two longer art works that depicted aspects of their lives, before, during and after criminal legal system involvement. In the first they described their ‘life journey’ and in the second - ‘layers’ of their lives.
In the last practice of the day participants drew from those two art works, while bringing together all they had learnt during the workshop about: colour, mark- and symbol-making, and drawing energy, to create a longer final art work about experience of the criminal legal system.
The Sharing Circle
The workshop finished with a sharing circle where the participants shared their final art work and spoke about their experience of the workshop.
